The Christian witness in Asia remains a powerful force as Communism depends on violence for security
The emergence in Communist China of the youthful Red Guards as strong-arm promoters of an anti-Christian “cultural revolution” is an ominous sign reminiscent of the Nazi youth movement of the Hitler era. Targets include leaders of the Christian community whose presence in China antedates the Communist regime.
What this development clearly indicates is that Communist “tolerance” of Christianity must never be confused with “religious freedom”—despite propaganda assurances. Moreover, it exhibits to all the world that Communism cannot really make headway against Christianity in a free society but must rely on violence, repression, and suppression for the entrenchment of its ideas.
China is now in the throes of a major crisis after which she will never be the same again. If a more militant regime emerges, there will be increasing trouble in the border areas of Russia, India, Viet Nam, and Thailand, with the classic maneuver of using a supposed external threat in order to unite an increasingly restless people. If a less militant regime emerges, there will be dramatic changes in China’s attitude toward Russia, Southeast Asia, and the United States—after the Soviet example.
The pattern that has developed in Asia is of new nations, large and small, that are extremely sensitive, intensely nationalistic, very desirous of rapid economic development without external interference, highly suspicious of the West, and even more suspicious of a militant Chinese Communism. It is very unlikely that they will choose Communism (although it could be forced on some of them), but the majority will without doubt be nationalist-socialist in emphasis.
Where does the Church fit into all this? With the acceleration of political events, plus the intensifying of the militant forms of regional religions (Arya Samaj Hinduism in the increasingly popular Jan Sangh party in India; the popularity of the new politically participating Buddhists in Ceylon, Viet Nam, Thailand, and Burma; the spectacular rise and spread of the Soka Gakkai Buddhists in Japan; the politically powerful attraction of Islam unity in Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines), there is no longer any doubt that missions as they have existed in Asia will be eliminated in the next ten to twenty years.
But it is also noteworthy that in Communist China, amid the most oppressive form of national-socialism, the Church not only has survived but is spreading—to the point of causing considerable concern to the Communist leaders. During the past two years newspapers and journals have carried widespread public debates on religion. In this highly regimented society, where the lives of the people are organized and scrutinized at every level, officials are still forced to admit that there are “underground home congregations,” “unpatriotic elements who hold religion above the state,” “counterrevolutionaries with reactionary religious beliefs” (a term usually applied to “fundamentalists”), and so on.
Despite fifteen years of suppression, persecution, discrimination, and ridicule; despite the regime’s complete control of all communications media, as well as its absolute powers in education and employment; despite the isolation of the churches from outside help—still the Church in China has continued to grow both in numbers and in influence. What has happened there could have a tremendous influence, not only in Asia but elsewhere, if the information were collected, sifted, and distributed. Some facets of this story will be told in George N. Patterson’s forthcoming volume on Christianity in Communist China.
Christian nationals of several Asian countries are realizing more and more that they should begin to prepare for personal witness for Christ without dependence on outside sources. This does not mean that they are becoming anti-Western (although there is more of this than missionaries and their churches in the West generally realize) or isolationist through fear of the possible consequences of association, such as happened in China. Rather, it means that national politics and circumstances are forcing them into “equality of co-existence” at all levels, including religion. The churches are realizing that they must support themselves as well as govern themselves.
The important contribution that the Church in the West can make to the Church in the East now and in the future lies, Mr. Patterson thinks, in communications—literature, radio, and possibly television (Japan is investing millions in the belief that mini-TV sets will be as popular as transistor radios in the next ten years)—rather than in the hospitals, schools, and churches of the past century.
In the special providence of God, evangelization seems to be taken care of by word of mouth, Scripture distribution, and radio broadcasts. What is desperately lacking (Catholics and Protestants agree on this) is teaching that nourishes the believers. Patterson’s recent research revealed that Jesuit and Franciscan fathers who collect and sift information from China acknowledge that broadcasts of the Voice of Manila (the Far East Broadcasting Company) into China are effectively sustaining faithful Catholic believers, as well as Protestants.
But the bulk of the best Christian writing and teaching in the West circulates only in the West, and there is nothing of any depth available in most of the East. And, except for some of the writings of Watchman Nee, the best of what has given such a distinctive character to Christian witness in the East, especially China, is not circulating in the West.
If there is to be a really constructive fellowship among the members of the Body of Christ in both East and West, with a two-way flow of benefit, then there will have to be a greater concentration on the development of communications.
‘Up With People’
Wearied by the brash utterances and unrestrained antics of Beatles, Vietniks, and black-power mongers, the spirit of many people was lifted and their confidence in today’s youth reaffirmed as one hundred clean-cut, enthusiastic college-age young people sang out for morality, freedom, and patriotism on the recent network telecast, “Up with People.” Rejected by CBS as ideological entertainment but accepted without prejudice by NBC, the Moral Re-Armament—produced “Sing-out” was as well received on television as it has been in community and campus presentations across the country. It utilized the current musical idiom of folksong harmony, guitars, and message lyrics to convey such convictions as:
Freedom isn’t free,
Freedom isn’t free.
You gotta pay a price,
You gotta sacrifice,
For your liberty.
and:
You can’t live crooked and think straight,
Whether you’re a worker or a Chief of State.
Clean up the nation before it’s too late,
’Cos you can’t live crooked and think straight.
These youths who, said host Pat Boone, “don’t make the papers—they make the country,” are typical of millions of young Americans determined to dedicate their lives to goals greater than immediate pleasure and material success. In the pursuit of purposeful and responsible lives, they desire to commit themselves to lofty ideals, as exemplified in the themes of the MRA sing-out troupe.
To the nation’s youth, the Church of Jesus Christ must realistically offer not just a code of ethics but the living Lord and Redeemer of mankind, who alone can bring meaning and wholeness to life and provide the power to live as free and moral men. As the “Up with People” record jacket relates, many young people “are detonating the myth of a soft self-indulgent and arrogant America, demonstrating an American enthusiastic in his sacrifice and sweat to help create a better world, ready at the drop of a hat, night or day, to stand up for what they believe in and to … sing out!”
Our youth are on the march as never before. Let us confront them with the Christ who alone can keep them singing—with or without guitars. And let our networks continue to give wings to their songs, not only as they lift their voices for liberty and noble ideals, but also as they sing of their faith in Almighty God.
A Worthy Proposal
In three summer issues of the Sunday School Times, Editor James Reapsome presented a proposal that might lead to major advances in the evangelical Sunday school. Taking as a parallel the recent Wheaton Congress on the Church’s Worldwide Mission, he called for a congress at which Sunday school leaders (publishers, professors of Christian education, denominational executives, pastors, and directors of Christian education) would face the desperate plight of the Sunday school.
This kind of gathering, says Reapsome, would deal with such matters as “finding living words for communication,” planning “educational programs for children that will take true account of family influence,” providing “education for adults as well as for children,” helping teachers to a sound knowledge of the faith, and aiding lay people “in corporate worship as well as in private devotional exercises.”
A conference like this ought to have the highest priority in evangelical strategy. While the National Sunday School Association has helped strengthen the Sunday school, this essential arm of the Church is still in deep trouble. For Protestantism by and large—and much of evangelicalism comes under this condemnation—the root of the trouble lies in a biblically illiterate laity. Adult Christian education through the local church must be expanded as rapidly as possible, if the Sunday school is to progress beyond its present pattern of too little instruction and much of that incompetent. Today public and independent education have risen to levels far higher than those of even twenty years ago. No longer will the hourly period for Sunday school instruction do. Bold, imaginative rethinking is needed.
At a time when major denominations are cooperating in Christian education, and an important study (The Church’s Educational Ministry: A Curriculum Plan) has been produced by the Cooperative Curriculum Project under the auspices of the National Council of Churches, evangelicals ought to work together to expand their horizons of Christian education.
The editor of the Sunday School Times has made a proposal that holds great promise for the evangelical Sunday school; we gladly support him.
Isolated From The Church?
One criticism of the missionary groups that met at Wheaton in the Congress on the Church’s Worldwide Mission was that they did not overcome their “isolation from the Church.” Many, particularly in ecumenical circles, are fond of this kind of accusation.
Admittedly, evangelicals, especially missionary-minded evangelicals, have sometimes made the mistake of not waiting for a denominational directive but of going out into new territory for no better reason than that there are heathen waiting to be evangelized and that official church agencies are not reaching them. This is not good enough for some ecclesiastical bureaucrats. Anyone attempting a task without denominational permission may run the risk of being rebuked.
All this provokes questions. How does a group of devoted church members, actively engaged in the Church’s primary task, become “isolated from the Church”? In such a context, what does “isolation from the Church” mean? Is it anything more than isolation from the ecclesiastical bureaucracy? It is time someone asked the ecumenical critics of evangelicals, “What is this ‘Church’ from which some evangelical missionaries are isolated?”
There is a great readiness to confuse the Church with institutional denominationalism. But the two are not the same. The New Testament knows nothing of institutional denominationalism. It indeed provides for the order of the visible church. It knows the people of God, the body of Christ, the bride of Christ, the household of God. It speaks of believers, of the elect, of those “in Christ,” and much more. It sees the Church as a band of redeemed and committed men and women in whom the Spirit of God dwells.
We are not, of course, advocating ecclesiastical anarchy. No one would claim that any individual Christian is at any time free to do anything he likes and to regard what he does as an official church activity. But we are concerned, and deeply concerned, at the prevailing tendency of some church leaders to disown everything that does not emanate from ecclesiastical officialdom. It is important to remember that the New Testament equates the Church with all the people of God.
The New Testament Church acted responsibly and in line with biblical church structures, avoiding the tendency to abuse legitimate authority by usurping prerogatives that belong to the Holy Spirit rather than to human officials. It was in obedience to the Holy Spirit that the “prophets and teachers” heeded the call to “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.” At the first Church council in Acts 15 the decisions of the council were prefaced by the words: “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us …” (Acts 15:28). Men become ecclesiastical bureaucrats when they arrogate to themselves power or authority to control men to whom the Holy Spirit may have been speaking in a different way.
From the Bible (or for that matter from ordinary common sense) it ought to be clear that the Church is people—not a bureaucracy, not clergy, not denominational leaders. It is the community of the redeemed. It is the family of God. Those who are so critical of some evangelical members of the body might profitably reflect that “the body does not consist of one member but of many.… The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’ ” (1 Cor. 12:14,21).
Let it be said with the utmost plainness that the humblest worshiper is just as much a member of the Church as is his pastor. Lay Christians who get together and decide, under the leadership of the Holy Spirit, to evangelize lost people about whom some denominations are doing nothing do not thereby excommunicate themselves. They remain in the body. They are church people, members of the household of God. To say that church people doing the Lord’s work in an independent mission, for example, are “isolated from the Church,” is a questionable judgment.
Southern Baptist Campus Evangelism
Southern Baptists are one of the fastest-growing denominations in the world. The secret of their expansion has been evangelism. Yet the cause of evangelism among Southern Baptists has lagged on the college and university campuses, their own included, with the result that church-related schools are graduating thousands of uncommitted students annually. This does not hold high promise in an age when young intellectuals soon become a formative influence.
It is often said that Texas culture is Baptist-tinted. The ten Baptist institutions of higher education in that state enroll 20,000 students. Southern Baptists engage fifty Baptist Student Union secretaries in Texas alone, and expend $1 million a year to support them in evangelistic endeavors. Last year they reported only 200 professions of faith. The inferences to be drawn from this are not entirely clear, but this meager number of commitments to Christ has become almost routine in BSU reports. Southern Baptists had better take a long, hard look at what this implies for the future.
A Nationwide Disaster: Alcoholism
“There’s little doubt that a disease so serious and widespread should constitute an emergency and—if fully comprehended—would be considered a nationwide disaster,” wrote Chuck Levy in the January, 1966, issue of California Monthly. This disease has six million Americans in its clutches, one-fifth of them women. One out of every twelve adult males who drink will be its victim. Alcoholism is a national catastrophe.
In the same article, Dr. Bernard L. Diamond, distinguished psychiatrist and professor of law and criminology on the University of California (Berkeley) campus, is quoted as saying that “we have an epidemic in our midst.… Most serious diseases have rates from one to ten or twenty per hundred thousand population.… Yet the public fails to become alarmed about alcoholism, an illness where the rates are literally thousands per hundred thousand population.”
A recent Gallup Poll states that 65 per cent of Americans over twenty-one use alcoholic beverages. The statistics in themselves tell a sad story but do not reveal the damage done to 25 million people indirectly affected by alcoholism; nor do they indicate alcohol’s destructive potential in work hampered or left undone.
Christians have long thought of alcoholism as a crime and a sin, not as a disease. What is becoming clearer is that alcoholism is a disease. And what must be shouted from the housetops is that people who do not drink do not become alcoholics. No one is an alcoholic before he takes his first drink. An ounce of prevention still is better than an ounce of alcohol.
Prohibition is not the answer. We tried that once and it failed. But we can do something about those who mix alcohol and driving; about the serving of alcohol to airplane passengers; about alcohol education; about radio, TV, and magazine advertising of liquor, wine, and beer.
Alcoholism is a national disaster. Although few of its victims are cured, we can do something to prevent others from contracting the disease.
The Policeman In Perspective
Police officers in this country deserve an encouraging word. They have been abused by criminals, vilified by demonstrators, undermined by politicians, rebuked by the courts, and all but ignored by the Church (when did you last hear a law-enforcement agent speak at a church gathering?).
This wave of abuse is taking its toll. Some policemen are resigning in disgust, and those remaining are losing some of the respect they once held in the eyes of the community.
Few citizens realize what demanding situations today’s policeman faces. He is exposed to unusual risks and subtle temptations. As the crime rate climbs, he is expected to do more and more, better and better. Seldom does he have more than a sampling of legal training; yet he must apply complex laws. A well-ordered society is at stake, but in most areas the policeman’s pay scale is hardly an incentive.
As so often happens, the misdeeds and indiscretions of a few have cast a pall over the entire profession. Those entrusted with law enforcement merit a better image. They deserve more support from clergy and lay people alike. A society tends to get only as much law enforcement as it really wants.
Needed: Communiques From The Front
Eternity may reveal that today’s most significant events are occurring, not in Rome or Geneva, nor even in Moscow or Washington, but in some remote jungle or plain where evangelical missionaries are sowing the gospel seed.
That being the case, it is regrettable that so few missionary exploits are communicated back to the home front on a candid and timely basis. A martyrdom or mass evacuation seems to be required before the work of a field is exposed to public view.
Surely one obstacle to more effective missionary communications is the missionary himself. He may count his time too precious to devote to feedback. He may not know how to single out those aspects of his work that interest people most. Or he may be plagued by a fear of news-media error or overexposure.
Whatever the reason, we in the publishing business know that there is a scarcity of competent reportage from the frontiers of evangelism. Although there is a lot of frothy, institutionally oriented promotion of overseas activity, “hard” missionary news is hard to come by.
